From: Alex Ferguson (abf@cs.ucc.ie)
Date: Tue 04 Aug 1998 - 04:01:19 EEST
Eric Hansen defends the HW tables, unto death:
> Conflict resolution in hero wars is based on a comparison of opposed results.
A
> table is, imo, a perfectly acceptable and reasonable way to convey these
> relationships to the player without running through a series of nested if
> satements.
Why not just make the actual rule simple enough that the degree of
"nesting" is negligable, if not non-existent? All that the table seems
to gain is that the assorted "tied" results -- "Failure/Faulure", "Big
Success/Big Success", etc -- differ, which seems to me to be extremely
non-crucial. If the mechanism _needed_ to have the degree of complexity
that a table can encode, then sure, use a table -- but why does HW need
a table for a mechanism fundamentally the same as that of RQ or
Pendragon, which do not?
What, in a word, does the added complexification of the HW table,
given how totally abstract it's supposed to be, actually _gain_?
> I know you will argue that the table's contents should be clearly
> expressed in longhand rules, with the table included as a play aid.
And your rebuttal of this point would be?
> The principles of conflict resolution are very clearly presented in the
> rules, and the tables simply let us know the outcome of any conflict at
> a glance. It is unnecessary to include the long version.
The point is that the non-tabular version won't be a "long version",
it'll be a "short version". And better yet, an "intuitively comprehensible"
one. If you don't believe this, compare say the Pendragon rules with the
HW ones. (I suggested a way of doing this for HW several posts ago...)
> I stand by my belief that objections to
> the Hero Wars contest tables are irrational.
As you have advanced no cogent argument that this is the case, I suggest
your belief in this objection's irrationality is in fact, irrational.
David Dunham:
> As for the main resolution table in Hero Wars, I think this is a case where
> the information is best presented in a table, rather than a bunch of
> sentences which say "if x then y."
To be a bit more explicit: my objection/suggestion is not "why not
present the same horribly special-case-ridden rule in non-tabular form",
but: "why not have a simpler rule, which doesn't _need_ to be presented
as a table?"
> The meta-rule is "the better roll wins,"
> but the table is necessary because of the betting of Status Points.
I disagree. It would be possible to handle this _much_ more uniformly;
the question is, why is it necessary to have such a whacky variety of
results? Each entry has up to two out of three possible types of result
(gain/forfeit/transfer), with a less than systenmatic distribution of
these. The mere fact of betting SP's on the result need not complicate
or necessitate the table at all.
Slainte,
Alex.
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